@natewardawg Most games take long enough to develop to make 1000$ a non-issue compared to the cost of living over the development time. 100$ might be too little a barrier to ward off junkware, aiming to collect some money before complaints reach Valve. Would probably require a field test though to find a good boundary value for such issues.

A fair solution might be to require a seizable entry fee, but then to count all or most of it against the 30% cut Valve takes.

On the other hand, there are games like "polycrusher", which was done as a students' project with the aim of not only developing a game, but also releasing it on a relevant platform.

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Quoting: immortelValve going with Linux to produce a new gaming system has been a big risk for them. Good for us but going against a giant like Microsoft, you need to have a lot of courage; just for that, they get all my respect.

Rather I assume that Valve felt having a gun pointed at their head, when Windows 8 came out with a store of its own. UWP games probably don't reduce that pressure, despite their major issues.

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Quoting: MalPortability (or retrocompatibility as they call it) is a huge value for console gamers. That's why consoles delay the next generation for as long as possible. M$ set the course to break this limitation in their ecosystem. Yeah: Sony won the xboxone/ps4 battle. But if doesn't do something quickly it will lose the war because when this console generation dies, traditional consoles will die with it.

I wonder... Typical console gamers don't want to think about hardware upgrades every few years, and console-developers are used to targetting a well-defined set of hardware configurations. The push for UWP games doesn't seem to go over well with the established PC gaming user base, so mixing cosole gamers and PC gamers together may backfire badly -- while technically it is better to have XBox games available for PC as well, especially for XBox owners, it can result in a lot of negative publicity if done wrong. At the moment I don't imagine too many XBox gamers caring about actually using the cross-purchase capability, while PC gamers abhor the possible implications for PC gaming.

Spreading yourself thin rather than focusing on the best possible user experience in a limited scope can also backfire badly. Part of the success of Valve for instance comes from having a clear focus.

Microsoft has little trust in the PC-gaming space as it is. If they do this TOO wrong, the alienate current PC gamers, risking a shift to Steam OS, and alienate XBox gamers, by making the XBox eco-system more PC-like. In the end instead of earning money from PC gaming more directly, they may hurt the dominant role of Windows for PCs and lose a share of the console market.

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Quoting: MalConsoles are dead friend. This is their last iteration.

Microsoft knows it and Sony probably suspects it.

Why do you think they brought win 10 on xbox one? In a couple of years, when their hardware will be to crappy for AAA titles, Microsoft will do what Valve is doing now: windows machines. Gaming PC with console form factor to put under your tv in your living room.

That is the "next generation".

This sounds a lot like what people said when the previous generation of consoles stayed around for roughly eight years. Yet the console business had a blast.

I don't see either branch going away anytime soon, though PC gamings ongoing strong reliance on Windows may prove problematic.

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I agree that this move is worrying; It gets a bit philosophical though -- is it better to get access to XBox games through the store which otherwise wouldn't have come to PC at all, or not to have those games at all?

There is a realistic risk that developers will go "oh hey, I can make an XBox version and get the PC port for free!" (or vice versa). Considering that mobile gaming is a huge market, and those users are used to locked-down apps, Windows store games may cause an influx of mobile gamers to PC that skews the perceived tastes of our market...

Quoting: tony1abIf a company make a lot of moves to make linux grow by increasing the available games to it, and also make good games discounts putting games at 1.49 dollars (I purchased half life 2 episode 2 for this price in the last sales), then is not evil to me.

Honestly, for all the money I have potentially saved by Steam sales, I wouldn't exactly list them in the "not evil" category. Its simply a marketing method. It is also at fault for my large Steam pile of shame [External Link].

Quoting: Mblackwell1) Not only do you not own the games on the Windows 10 Store but you never receive the full binary package.

What does Steam say about that anyway? Anything with DRM is bound to the underlying service just as much as "ownership" of a Windows store game is bound to the store account. DRM-free games probably have better licensing, but even then resale is probably prohibited; That concept simply doesn't translate well to digital content.

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Quoting: AnxiousInfusionThe console experience is only "far superior to what PC can offer" if the user cannot or does not want to think for himself. Unless you're saying that Valve need to target people who cannot think independently, in which case I guess I agree as SteamOS is meant to strip away the "hard" things about PC gaming.

EDIT: Let me reword this to be less combative. What console-only aspects of the gaming experience does SteamOS not yet have, that you feel it should?

Your striked-out text pretty much summarizes it. On consoles you just buy a game, put it in the device and play. No further thinking required, which I count as a bonus after a day at work. No thinking if a game is available for that OS (you wouldn't own it otherwise), or how to optimize graphics settings for a good FPS vs quality. Upgrades are trivial too, as the only upgrade path is buying a newly released console.

Add to this, that Steam machines will never give the same price/performance as consoles up front, as the latter are subsidized by game sales and can have games much more optimized due to entirely uniform hardware, than what is possible for PCs.

Until these things are fixed -- though I can't imagine how the subsidizing part can be fixed -- most PC gamers seem better off using Windows and console gamers using consoles. For the time being their effort will mostly help Linux users who want to have a better choice of games, and for Windows users by creating pressure for Microsoft to be careful about the things they try with Windows, but I can't imagine many people switching anytime soon.

It is good to know the alternatives though, in case that Microsoft uses the continous-upgrade style of Windows 10 (i.e. can't protest by sitting out a bad-reputation upgrade like Vasta or 8) to push unpopular changes.

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Quoting: aLGabe has said several times he wants to remove green-light completely, so they are aiming at less curation, not more

The likely outcome of this: Instead of looking at the Steam store for interesting games, I will rely even more on reading articles on gaming sites, similar to how I have stopped installing any Android apps prior to reading about them outside of the Play Store. By comparison my trust into the iOS App Store is higher, due to a mixture of more restrictive device access and curation. Looking at Steam, where a program can wreak unlimited havoc to at least user files, and on Windows by including one of the UAC prompts still quite common with games, even to system files, its only a matter of time before someone has all his photos and documents deleted by a malicious Steam game.

On the other hand... there is basically now other option if they want to support indie games. It might become necessary though to ship games in a mobile-device style sandbox to mitigate such risks.

Again, plain ripoffs are probably intended to be handled by the refund system and community curators. Sadly depending on the community ultimately means that people will ignore games they haven't previously read about on independent blogs / magazines, which in turn increases the incentive to look at other storefronts like GoG.

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My guess: Valve wants such cases to be handled by many many people using the refund option. Not a good approach for a business, but certainly community-driven.

It won't be long now, before Steam starts distributing viruses :/

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[quote=Bomyne
But to be fair... We are linux users. It's not hard for us to setup links ("ln -s" command) from the save locations to our dropbox folder. We don't need our hands help like Windows users.[/quote]Actually that solution is just as possible on Windows when using NTFS. This solution is used e.g. to spread Steam libraries over multiple drives (though by now Steam supports to change the location during installation at least) or to sync directories outside the Dropbox directory to Dropbox.

But it is really sad to see this mess imported over to Linux... On Windows the Documents directory is all but unusable for actual user data due to cluttering by program data. And then there are all those games, where I lost the savegames and had to start over, because they were hidden in awkwardly named places inside AppData or, DOS-style, inside the game directory, and thus were forgotten when reinstalling the OS.

BTW, that floating horizontal bar is awful for smartphone screens, when trying to write comments...

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Quoting: RadegastMicrosoft bought Skype too and it still has a linux version

And funny enough they linux version was better, last I used Linux, because it had not seen the counter-productive interface updates for some time (worst of them being the use of Modern-UI autocorrection in the Desktop version).

Windows 8: Minecraft works perfectly fine on Windows 8.

Selling Mojang: I don't really care, really. They can't destroy minecraft (or minecraft for linux) entirely, as it would only make pirated version more wide-spread. I doubt they'd reprogram it in C# or something. Scroll's didn't seem very interesting either. So far all practical purposes, he may as well take the money and do something with it (i.e. I agree with Teal on that), even if it is buying a villa on some tropical island.

As for the claimed price: Seems way overestimated.

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